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Monday, April 23, 2012

I had posted an article about neuroscience and fiction previously. http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5630711609871539058#editor/target=post;postID=730063957582045987Here's a rebuttal of that original article; a broad criticism. The author of The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media, says that her problem is "the flippant use of neuroscience as it is
bandied about in our popular consciousness by the media." She coins the phrase "neuro-pop crowd" and adds, "While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is
particularly dangerous, it’s misleading."

Although I hadn't given it a thought when I read the original article, this rebuttal made sense. Neuroscience, well translated into practical information and how-tos is most relevant for clinical diagnosis and treatment and/or learning about thinking, emotions, behavior, and their interactions — not for the arts and humanities. It was fun to see both articles by good writers, smart women, making good points, but in strong disagreement.

The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media

The
New York Times and many other respected, well-known newspapers seem to
have an unending love affair with the fMRI machine and what it can
supposedly tell us about who we are. In the past two weeks alone, we
were blessed with the following gems—“The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction” and “The Brain on Love,”
both of which try to explain complex human phenomena, like the pleasure
of reading or the feeling of being in love, using brain scans. Now
don’t get me wrong. Neuroscience is indeed a fascinating field that has
and will help tremendously in discovering how the brain works and the
reasons which cause it to malfunction. The brain has historically been a
mystery to scientists, so to knock neuroscience as a legitimate field
is not at all what I’m trying to do.
Most of these
“Your Brain on X” or “The Neuroscience of X” articles use the same exact
formula—they talk about a study using brain scans, and then they
triumphantly conclude that a subjective experience is “real” because
parts of the brain light up on the scan. For example, an article will
suggest that because the region of your brain that processes pleasure
lights up with activity when you eat something fattening, it means that
–wait for it—fatty foods really are pleasurable!

Another common thread among the neuro-pop crowd is the mixing of
often irreconcilable disciplines to come to some sort of higher truth
about both disciplines. Almost no humanistic field of study has escaped
the scourge of someone or another trying to explain the field in terms
of firing neurons. There’s neuroeconomics, neuro-literary criticism,
even neuro-aesthetics. While conciliense—the attempt to unify different
bodies of knowledge—can yield interesting results, it’s only possible if
the two different fields ask similar questions. Neuroscience and
literary criticism do not have the same aims. Raymond Tallis most
engagingly criticized this in his article “A Suicidal Tendency in the Humanitiies”:

A mode of literary studies that addresses the most
complex and rich of human discourses, not with an attention that aims to
reflect or at least respect that complexity and richness, but with a
simplifying discourse whose elements are blobs of the brain (and usually
the same blobs), wheeled out time after time is the kind of contempt
that, along with the mobilization of other disciplines half-digested, in
this case bad biology rather than bad philosophy and worse linguistics
that we saw in Theory. If literary criticism is to serve any worthwhile
function, it won’t be concerned with putative mechanisms of grotesquely
reduced and traduced neuralised reader responses or Darwinised authorial
motives but with helping readers to make sense of, and put into larger
context, a work that repays careful attention.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is
particularly dangerous, it’s misleading. It incorrectly reduces both the
human self and the field of neuroscience to something simple and easily
digested in a 500 word newspaper article. In a world saturated in
skin-deep media, this is not what the public needs.

WELCOME TO IWO!

It's the beginning of the third year of intelligentwomenonly.com I've started off with some retrospective posts as a reminder to me and you that this blog started out focused on understanding and eliminating negative self-talk. Not surprising since my current book project is Handbook #l for Intelligent Women: Break the Negative Self-Talk Habit.Strong beliefs underlie intelligentwomenonly.com posts:• Research based advice/suggestions/content contain more accurate facts and greater value than pop psychology.• Intelligent girls and women are more likely than intelligent boys and men to limit themselves because of their self-talk.• Negative self-talk is a bad habit, not a neurosis or psychosis. Unfortunately, it's normal in a majority of girls and women.

•The negative self-talk habit has to be eliminated before realistic (or positive thinking) can be learned and maintained.• Positive self-talk cannot create a positive reality even if the negative self-talk habit is broken.• Self-help approaches can work for changing thinking, feeling, and behavioral habits.In the next nine months of 2012, I would love to be able to tell you that the book will be published this year or next. In the meantime I've become intrigued with new brain research about thinking and emotions, particularly applicable and useful for and to women. I'll post no more about gender differences, unless they're wildly interesting, and more about intelligent women's psychology, thinking, feelings, and out front actions. I've added a new red subject box, Writers and Writing, targeted specifically for writers, of course!

I'm still looking for some controversy, disagreement, new information from readers. I'm open to your thoughts about what you'd like to hear more about — or less about!Please send me your comments, suggestions, questions, criticisms — all of you intelligent women out there!